World of WarCraft: The War Within: Hotfix optimizes difficulty of the depths

The Depths, mini-dungeons that can be played solo or in a group, are one of the big new features of World of Warcraft: The War Within. But what was supposed to be fun caused frustration among players.

Solo playable mini-dungeons as high-end content that don’t necessarily have to be played in a group? Sounded like paradise for players of World of Warcraft: The War Within who don’t necessarily like playing with others and aren’t keen on raids or mythical dungeons. But the feature blew up in Blizzard’s face.

The problem: the difficulty balance was completely wrong. As the players had discovered, the dungeons are much harder to complete solo than in a group, especially for some classes. So while soloists struggle through, often unsuccessfully, groups mastered the depths practically in their sleep and bagged the extremely valuable loot without much effort.

Even the NPC companion was no real help for the solo players and barely managed to provide enough healing or even revive the player, as human players can. One player took the trouble to to get to the bottom of the scaling of the opponents and discovered that the bosses actually had more lives when played solo than when played in a group of two or three players.

Blizzard has finally reacted and released a hotfix for the problem. It fixes scaling errors, increases enemy health for groups, adjusts damage, and much more. Here are the patch notes for the new hotfix:

Delves

• Fixed a bug causing bosses to scale incorrectly with more players.

• Increased the health scaling of enemies in Delves while grouped with other players.

• Reduced the damage scaling of many enemy abilities in Delves while grouped with other players.

• Adjusted enemy targeting preferences in Delves.

  • Developers’ notes: Our goal is to match the difficulty of solo and group play as much as possible in Delves. When looking at data on group delves, we noticed unexpectedly low combat times coupled with unexpectedly high lethality. We identified the root cause of this issue and corrected it. This fix will increase the health scaling of enemies per additional player present, but we are also reducing the damage scaling of many abilities to compensate.

• Zekvir’s influence has grown stronger, introducing a new enemy variant in Delve Tier 8.

• Fixed an issue where the health bar UI could fail to display values correctly in Zekvir’s Lair while in a group.

• Revives Remaining has changed to Lives Remaining. Now any time a player dies, the counter is reduced (was any time a player releases spirit). In addition, reaching a checkpoint will now provide +1 life.

  • Developer’s note: This mechanic was proving to be confusing in its functionality, making it a mistake to release spirit when playing with certain compositions. This change should make the experience more consistent regardless of group size or makeup.